Few bands have had such a fan-pleasing middle age as the Cure. With or without a new album to promote, Robert Smith and his crew sporadically go on the road with hit-heavy sets and endless encores. To paraphrase Linda Evangelista, they won't get out of bed for a set shorter than three hours. So while most bands recreate one classic album, it's entirely in character for the Cure to opt for a chronological trilogy.

The sequence illustrates the startling speed of their musical evolution. During the best songs from their 1979 debut, Three Imaginary Boys, they are a taut punk trio, but the weaker moments puzzle Smith himself. "Even I don't know where that one came from," he says after Meathook. The album feels like a pencil sketch next to the shifting watercolours of Seventeen Seconds, whose highlights, Play for Today and A Forest, prompt the first big cheers of the night. Faith marks another leap forward: a perversely comforting ode to silence, distance, passivity and defeat, which holds the crowd spellbound.

Having built such morbid momentum, it's a shame they let it dissipate during the encores with an overly completist dedication to under-rehearsed B-sides and a misjudged finale of lightweight singles such as The Love Cats. Had they used that final hour to play 1982's infernal masterpiece Pornography instead, the night could have been extraordinary.

But Smith admits he's "a stickler for moving through the past slowly". Having invited back original drummer and keyboardist Lol Tolhurst, who left the band in bitter circumstances in 1989, to play these shows, Smith is in a fond and reflective mood, dropping in goofy, self-effacing comments. "It appears I can't play the blues in any way, shape or form," he says after some ropey harmonica on Splintered in Her Head. Perhaps it's unreasonable to demand that the Cure sustain the same fraught intensity of their fruitfully dysfunctional youth. They may restage the past brilliantly, but they cannot be expected to relive it.